I checked the mail yesterday to find the usual pile of bulk-mail envelopes stuffed with offers of low-interest credit cards and travel packages. The new Pottery Barn catalog was stuck to the latest IKEA catalog, next to yet another 20% off coupon from Bed, Bath and Beyond. All fodder for the recycle bin.

As I carried the stack inside, I noticed a speckled brown envelope sticking out from the rest. It was made of heavy card stock, and my name was handwritten on the front ~ not printed in a handwriting font, but actually lettered with a ballpoint pen in uneven lines.

A letter! I opened it up to find a thank-you note from See, an eyewear shop on Union Street, where I recently purchased a pair of frames. It was written by my salesperson; he wrote that I should "stop by if I ever needed the frames re-adjusted" and signed his name at the bottom.

Of course I was disappointed that it wasn't a letter from a friend, but I was nevertheless impressed.I spend at least an hour every week sorting through junk mail, feeding the cover pages into a shredder and piling the rest into a stack for recycling. It is a task that always makes me feel resentful. How many trees have you wasted on me so far this year? I silently rage. A pox on your house! The letter from See, in comparison, made me feel like a valued client.

As I stood in the hallway, letter in hand, it occurred to me that handwritten letters might be a brilliant communications tool for writers and freelancers such as myself, a personal touch amid the flood of e-mail and junk paper mail that assaults us on a daily basis. I envisioned myself at an ebony desk, bent over a fountain pen and a pot of ink, dashing off charming missives that would delight everyone who was lucky enough to receive one. I ran to the cabinet where I keep a supply of stationery, and rifled through the boxes of pretty cards and heavy paper, humming "Sunday Mail" by Marcy Playground:

Won't you send me something soon?Won't you swing me near the moonWith those wordsI know I know you will...

Swing me near the moon indeed. I would send a letter to my agent; I would send one to my publisher; I would send one to each of my prospective clients. Beautiful handwritten letters were going to be my new super-communication strategy, setting me apart from everyone else and rocketing my career to stratospheric heights.

Literary readings are not always compelling. Some authors stumble over their words and rush through their material with nary a pause; some lack the stage presence to elevate a reading to a moving performance.

But there are others.

Authors who make eye contact with the audience, whose delivery makes the material crackle and leap. Authors whose voices resonate inside the heads of the listeners afterwards, so that whenever the listener picks up the book, they hear an echo composed of the voice and the printed word.

The anthology features the works of fifty-two different women. The works range from poems to essays to short stories sprinkled with exclamations written in Farsi.

Eight of the contributors read that night, including the editor, Persis Karim. Every single one of them was beautiful and smart and riveting. The material was at once moving and timely, offering glimpses into experiences both familiar and not. They spoke about love and loss and longing. Two women wryly recalled being asked if they drove camels "back at home."

When the ferry landed at Craignure on the Isle of Mull, we set out to drive the 37 miles to Fiohnnport. From there, we would catch another ferry to Iona. How long could it take to travel 37 miles? 45 minutes, maybe 50, considering that that the events of the morning had caused me to be rather wary of the gas pedal?

I rolled down the window to catch the breeze, anticipating two days of rest and no driving. I took a deep, calming breath. And then the road suddenly narrowed. By “narrowed” I mean that two lanes abruptly became one, as if someone had cinched a giant belt around the road to make it slimmer. What were we supposed to do? Our only clue was cryptic sign that read “Use Lay-Bys.”

A lay-by is a small bulge to one side of the road, where you pull your car over to let another pass. The general rule, we quickly surmised, is that when two cars approach each other, the one with the nearest lay-by pulls over, while the other one drives by.

This would have been a brilliant idea if the road was straight and one could see more than 100 yards in the distance. This being a remote road on a small island, it curved and dipped, with numerous blind corners. I could not remember reading about a perilous single-lane road in any of my guidebooks. Somehow, this significant little detail had entirely escaped my notice.

Suffice it to say that I drove the entire 37 miles with my heart somewhere in the vicinity of my throat. I crept around the corners, petrified of finding a car headed straight towards me, with nowhere to escape. “Keep on the lookout!” I barked at my sister. “As soon as you think you see another car- even something that looks like a car- speak up!” A tad melodramatic, I confess. That’s how I behave after a night of no sleep and Sudafed and a fender-bender.

The worst moments were when we encountered one of the tour buses that lumber back and forth between the ferries. The buses seemed wider than the road itself, and they came within centimeters of our side mirrors. To release tension, we giggled over the sheep that seemed to be everywhere; along the road, in the road, and dotted over the hills.

We made to Fiohnnport with our side mirrors intact,a scant one hour and thirty minutes after we set out. I dropped my sister off at the ferry dock, and parked the car in the long-term lot, leaving it behind with no small sense of relief.

Fifteen minutes later, we were walking onto Iona. Small fishing boats dotted the bay, punctuated by red buoys that bobbed along the surface of the water. A picturesque row of houses and hotels faced out towards the water, among them the Argyll Hotel, where we had a reservation. We checked in and promptly went to our room and took a nap.

After a gorgeous breakfast in the sun room at the dun na mara guest house in Benderloch, we loaded our bags back into the car. Our goal was to make it to the tiny island of Iona by late afternoon. To get there, we had to drive to Oban, catch the ferry to the Isle of Mull, drive across Mull and catch another ferry on the far side of the island to take us to Iona. It had sounded simple when I was creating the itinerary at home. Now it sounded like a great many stops and starts.

We decided to take our time traveling the short distance to Oban. We had stopped there the previous night and had been less than charmed by the tacky rows of shops and dingy storefronts that dotted its streets, and so we spent the morning touring an old castle oddly set behind a marine research center. It turned out to be less of a castle than a wall of stone set on a sloping lawn. We wandered aimlessly for a while before deciding to get back on the road.

At the entrance to the highway, I flicked my right turn signal on and glanced to the left before pulling out into the road. A second too late, I glanced to the right to see an enormous vehicle heading directly towards us. My sister gasped and clutched her seat belt. I shifted into reverse and hit the gas.

Forty-eight hours after landing in Glasgow, I slid into the driver’s seat of a snazzy silver rental car. Like most cars in the UK, it was a diminutive, fuel-efficient model. Even when I raised the steering wheel to full tilt, my knees still pressed against it; the top of my head narrowly missed the roof. I reminded myself, as I shifted with my left hand through a trial spin of the parking lot, that I would be turning into the left hand lane, not the right. When turning across lanes, I would have to look for the right for oncoming cars, not the left.

Remember what it was like to get your driver’s license? Remember the written test, with its myriad of “Choose A, B, C, or D” answers, followed by the dreaded physical test with the guy in a polyester shirt who sat in the passenger seat, clutching his clipboard and making cryptic notes while you tried to parallel park?

To rent a car in a foreign country, all one has to do is to show one’s drivers license and slap a credit card on the counter. No one quizzes you about your understanding of the local signs and symbols. No knowledge of roundabouts is needed.

I am an excellent driver in California, albeit somewhat speedy and often annoyed by the more hesitant folks on the road. But at the moment when I had a set of keys in one hand and a map of Scotland in the other, I instantly felt uncertain. What’s that saying about payback?

Our plan was to head north out of Glasgow, towards Inverary and the western coast. We would go as far west as Iona, a speck-sized island with a rich history. I handed the stack of maps and guidebooks to my sister.

“You’re my co-pilot,” I announced. She gulped.

Getting out of the city was stressful. My sister shuddered as we narrowly avoided scraping walls and sidewalks on the left, while I felt as if I couldn’t possibly edge any farther to the right without facing certain death. I finally relaxed once we were on the A82. Highways are highways no matter where you are: point the car in the right direction and everything should work out fine.Less than an hour out of the city, we felt as if we had driven onto a movie set. The A82 curves along the edge of the land, with the great watery body of Loch Lomond on one side and rolling, craggy hills on the other. Buttercups grew in profusion near the road; speckled foxgloves on long, slender stems sprouted up between thick stands of Queen Anne’s Lace and mounds of soft, waving grass. There were more shades of green in one square mile than my thesaurus has words to describe them.